Brownstone continues to diagnose the problem perfectly, but misses badly on the prescription side.
I appreciate the full Machiavellian diagnosis, focusing HEAVILY on the lockdowns and ballgags, less on the needles. As I’ve been tiresomely and pointlessly repeating, the needles were only a few moments of pain. The rest of it was two full years of UNREMITTING NAZI TORTURE.
RFK has Pipered the opponents into worrying about the few moments and ignoring the two full years. This is a classic Sorosian trick.
On the prescription side, Brownstone is accurately bleak, but still hasn’t gone full Mach.
No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them.
Harder to restrain them? Nothing at all restrained them in 2020. Bureaucracies normally restrain a sudden tyranny through plain old Parkinsonian inertia. The demons had been working for 15 years to train ALL BUREAUCRACIES IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD to flip at the same exact moment.
Part of the preparation was 12 years of total QE and ZIRP, which trained all corporations and banks and universities to DEPEND SOLELY ON GOVERNMENT for their sustenance. Corporations eagerly abandoned real business, abandoned employees and customers, and shaped all of their activities toward keeping Deepstate happy.
Brownstone is basically Libertarian, so it completely blows off the ONE BRIGHT SPOT, which is Jerome Powell and the other central banks. Turning off the counterfeit and restoring real interest makes it harder to clamp a new lockdown. Loans with real interest are now in place, and investors are quickly learning to seek PROFIT instead of WELFARE. Profit requires REAL BUSINESS, which means REAL EMPLOYEES who must be kept alive, and REAL CUSTOMERS who must be pleased. Corporations are learning the lesson through strikes and Quiet Quitting on one side, and boycotts on the other.
In late 2020 when some countries and states pulled away from the demons, there was a pretty decent correlation between real industry and sanity. States that depended on actual business and actual farms were dropping the muzzles and lockdowns.
Brownstone sees real interest as a problem, not a cure.
Polistra's Mill 